Friday, December 28, 2012

Top 10 slipstream books

From Wikipedia:
Slipstream is a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, in July 1989. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as "the fiction of strangeness," which is as clear a definition as any of the others in wide use.
In 2003 Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author Christopher Priest named his top 10 slipstream books for the Guardian.  One title on the list:
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

Schulz was a Polish writer, murdered in an almost offhand way by the Gestapo during the second world war. His canvas was small: few of his stories ventured outside the setting of his parents' house or the provincial town in which he lived, but his scope was cosmic. One story, The Comet, achieves a Wellsian grandeur, a Kafkaesque intrigue when the author's father, who figures in most of the stories, emerges as a hero of science.
Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue